Medical, dental, pharmaceutical, veterinary or mortuary instruments and devices that are exposed to blood or other body fluids require thorough cleaning and microbial deactivation or sterilization between each use. Liquid microbial deactivation systems are now widely used to clean and deactivate instruments and devices that cannot withstand the high temperatures of a steam sterilization system. Liquid microbial deactivation systems typically operate by exposing the medical devices and/or instruments to a liquid disinfectant or sterilization composition, such as peracetic acid or some other strong oxidant.
In such systems, the instruments or devices to be cleaned are typically placed within a chamber within the liquid microbial deactivation system, or in a container that is placed within the chamber. During a deactivation cycle, a liquid disinfectant is then circulated through a liquid circulation system that includes the chamber (and the container therein).
Following the deactivation cycle, a rinse solution, typically water, is circulated through the chamber to remove traces of the microbial deactivate and any particulate that may have accumulated on the instruments or devices during the deactivation cycle. As will be appreciated, it is important to have rinse water of high purity to insure that the microbially deactivated instruments and devices do not become re-contaminated during the rinse cycle.
The water used to rinse the instruments and devices generally passes through a filtration system to remove mycobacterium particulates from the water. Although small amounts of the liquid sterilant may back-up to the downstream side of the filtration system, the upstream contents of the filtration system are generally not microbially deactivated and/or sterile. Thus, there is a possibility that microbial contamination may accumulate in the upstream side of the filtration system over time, and subsequently pass into the downstream side of the filtration system and be introduced into the chamber during a rinse cycle.
The present invention overcomes these and other problems and provides an improved filtration system for filtering water used in a microbial deactivation system.